Christian Cooper "Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World"

 

That Infamous Central Park Birdwatcher Writes a Memoir
Christian Cooper's superhero name is Captain Cry Bully

As a teacher in front of a class I saw my students as their fellow students did not see them. The pale girl with thin hair looked as if a stiff wind might shred her. If others noticed her at all, they wrote her off as "shy." In fact cancer had monopolized thirty percent of this teen's time on planet earth. She was taking college classes on the off chance that she might survive long enough to have a career. A middle-aged German immigrant performed better than her peers. This apparent superhuman hid vulnerabilities. In addition to school, she had work, and daily visits to her hospitalized son after his nearly fatal accident. The very handsome Circassian lad assured me that his parents would kill him if they knew he was gay and did not believe in Allah. There was the smiling, effervescent baker who had to rise at three a.m. Without parents or scholarships, she was paying her own way and lived in rock bottom poverty. All these students were white.

I grew up poor; my mother lost three babies; four of my siblings died young. One of my childhood friends was so malnourished and neglected that doctors tell him his life span will be shortened. Three of his grandparents died in the Gulag. One escaped. My friend now lives in a comfortable suburb. How? William Saroyan described my friend's trajectory.

"Work. Work all my life. All my life, work.

From small boy to old man, work.

In old country, work. In new country, work.

In New York. Pittsburgh. Detroit. Chicago. Imperial Valley. San Francisco.

Work. No beg. Work."

A getaway for him is, if he can squeeze it in, an hour's walk in a wooded area. He has so many dreams but work eats up the limited time he has left. He's a white man.

When I was a nurse's aide, I had to catheterize a beautiful, young athlete who looked like Michelangelo's David. His final act in a functioning body was to dive into water. Some kink in the physics of that dive paralyzed him from the neck down. He was a white man. In Nepal I helped nuns from the Sisters of Charity collect the elderly from the streets where their families dropped them off to die. We washed countless lice and fleas out of their clothing with cold water from a pump in the courtyard.

Humans are social animals and evolution has equipped us with compassion. Decent people like you and me want to address suffering so we donate to charitable organizations, we volunteer, we visit nursing homes, we lend an ear and a shoulder, we pray. Morally retarded people do something else with suffering.

Amazon Manipulates Reviews and Sends Malware Link to Reviewer -- Because I Didn't Like Two Hot Books

Amazon Manipulates Reviews and Sends Malware Link to Reviewer
Because I Didn't Like Two Hot Books

Sometime during the summer of 2023, I posted a review of Elliot Page's memoir Pageboy on Amazon. I take words seriously, even the words that constitute Amazon reviews. Language can convey truth; language can empower lies. The difference between truth and lies is the difference between life and death. In my faith, Satan is the father of lies. God is the logos, the Word; God is truth and the truth sets us free. 

Elliot Page's Pageboy is a poorly written book. I said so in my review. I said this because bad writing matters. "Writing clearly is thinking clearly." Writing poorly underwrites destructive behavior. Identifying bad writing is a worthwhile use of time.

I'm thinking of a novelist who earned his PhD writing about theater. This short, physically handicapped novelist didn't deal in bullets or fisticuffs, but he was Hitler's right-hand. Without Joseph Goebbels' speeches, movies, school curricula, and book burnings, Nazism would have found it more difficult to achieve its diabolical ends. On the other end of the ethical spectrum, we have the words of the Ten Commandments; we have the Beatitudes; we have crusading novelists like Harriet Beecher Stowe who helped end slavery. Yes, words and how we use them matter a great deal.

In my review of Pageboy, mindful of current speech codes, I did not refer to Elliot Page as "she." Rather, I focused on, as I said in the review, "sentence structure, punctuation, narrative flow, and coherence." I received a cheerfully-worded email telling me that my review was up, thanking me for the review, and providing a link that allowed me to visit the review. I did so. I saw the review on Amazon.

A few days later I thought of the review again, clicked on the link Amazon provided, and saw an error message. "That page does not exist," the message said, or words to that effect. I had received no notification from Amazon that the review would be removed. I received no explanation as to why it was removed. I received no warning telling me that if I posted another honest review of a poorly written book, I would be banished from Amazon forever. I received no instruction on how to write reviews that Amazon would not delete.

Perhaps a month after that, I again attempted to review a book on Amazon, Christian Cooper's Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World. Again, I received a cheery notification from Amazon telling me that my review was posted. I clicked on the link Amazon sent and I saw the review. Again, a few days later, I clicked on that same link and got the same message. "This page does not exist." Again,  I received no notification, and no explanation.

I shrugged. I was resigned. I moved on with my life.

On September 7, 2023, weeks after the above events, my inbox was flooded with approximately one hundred emails from Amazon. The emails that I read before deleting them all said the same thing. "Thank you for reporting a fake review," or words to that effect. This made no sense. I hadn't been reporting fake reviews at Amazon. At the end of this avalanche of spam from Amazon came the final email. That final email informed me that all of my reviews, reviews going back almost thirty years, had been removed. I would never again be allowed to post reviews on Amazon, not for books or for anything else. If I bought a spatula that was a really good spatula, I could never say that on Amazon.

I was offered a link to click. I clicked on the link and was sent to the main Amazon page. There was I invited to click on another link. Computer expert friends warned me not to click on the link Amazon sent me. It was a scam link to malware. Someone at Amazon had used my account to generate a series of false reports of fake reviews, and then to ensnare me into clicking on a malware link.

The Devil and Bella Dodd by Mary Nicholas and Paul Kengor. Book Review

 

The Devil and Bella Dodd
How the Most Important Female Communist in the US Found God and Rejected the Devil

The Devil and Bella Dodd: One Woman's Struggle Against Communism and Her Redemption is a 2022 account of the career of Bella Dodd (1904-1969), once "the most important female communist in the United States." Author Mary A. Nicholas is a physician and research librarian. Her co-author, Paul Kengor, is a political science professor, bestselling author, think tank director, and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. Tan Books is a Catholic publisher. The Devil and Bella Dodd is 422 pages long, inclusive of an index, a bibliography, and extensive footnotes.

Bella Dodd's life story is so astounding that if it were fiction, readers could be forgiven for thinking that it could never have happened in real life. Maria Assunta Isabella Visono came to the US when she was five years old. She had been living with foster parents. Her parents and many siblings had already immigrated to the US, possibly when Dodd was two years old. She used the name "Bella" and eventually married a man named Dodd. The marriage ended because of her commitment to the Communist Party. Dodd received degrees from New York University and Columbia, an Ivy League school – remarkable for a female Italian American immigrant from a poor family. She became a professor, lawyer, and organizer. She described herself as a key figure who injected the Communist Party's agenda into American public education. She claimed that she had placed over a thousand Party followers into Catholic seminaries. She began to have doubts about the Party in the 1940s. Her deteriorating attitude prompted her to be expelled in 1949.

Golda 2023 Starring Helen MIrren. Review.

 

Golda
Helen Mirren Astounds in a Fast-Paced, Moving Biopic

Golda is a biopic about Golda Meir and the Yom Kippur War. The film was released in the US on August 25, 2023. Golda Meir was Israel's fourth prime minister, its first and only woman prime minister, and the third woman prime minister in the world. Her tenure was from 1969 to 1974. She resigned after the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Golda Meir was not only exceptional because she was a woman and a leader, and not only because she rose to power without being the wife or daughter of a male leader. World leaders typically cultivate as glamorous an image as they can; attractiveness is a form of power. Golda Meir, in her youth, looked like a studious, serious young lady, more interested in books and service than primping in front of a mirror. In her maturity, Meir looked like a grandmother. Pulling back her long, graying, frizzy hair into a bun and keeping it in place with barrettes was her one obvious grooming choice. Her suits were in neutral colors, conservative and unadorned. She wore sensible shoes that came to be known as "Golda shoes." Eschewing obvious appeals to glamour, Golda Meir, counterintuitively, became an icon.

Meir lived a life on the front lines of historic events that affect us today. She was born in 1898 in Kiev, what is now Ukraine, and what was then part of the Russian Empire. The Russian Empire was not a safe place for Jews for much of the early twentieth century. Anti-Semitic violence was increasing significantly. "Between 1918 and 1921, over 1,000 anti-Jewish riots and military actions … were documented in about 500 different locales throughout what is now Ukraine … a conservative estimate is that 40,000 Jews were killed and another 70,000 subsequently perished from their wounds, or from disease, starvation, and exposure … About two-thirds of all Jewish houses and over half of all Jewish businesses in the region were looted or destroyed," writes historian Jeffrey Veidlinger.